End Game

by David Hagberg

  “She’s an ambitious girl. It’s one of the reasons we got married. But she won’t leave the senator.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “Not till Wednesday.”

  “Five days,” she said. She took a drink of her wine and then smiled up at him. “Okay, Jeff, your place, or would you rather go to a hotel?”

  He returned her smile, only the slight hint of guilt at the corners of his eyes. “I have a small place just up Potomac Street. It’s walking distance.”

  “You’ve done this before.”

  “Like I said, she’s gone all the time. And we have snoopy neighbors where we live.”

  * * *

  It was nearly ten by the time they’d finished at the bar and walked across the street and up Potomac, to a corner building on N Street NW. His tiny apartment was up on the fourth floor, in what had once been an attic. The ceilings, especially in the tiny bedroom and kitchen, were sloped, and the place was sparsely furnished. It didn’t look lived-in.

  Alex dropped her bag beside the couch in the living room and went into the kitchen, where she found a half bottle of Jack Daniels on the counter.

  He carried a briefcase, which he dropped on a chair in the living room, along with his jacket. He slipped out of his shoes and took off his tie as he came to her.

  Alex opened the Jack and took a deep draught before she handed it to him. “Do you have to go into the office in the morning?”

  “I’m giving myself a long weekend,” he said, taking a pull on the bottle. He handed it back to her, and she took another drink.

  “Sounds good,” she said. “We have the weekend. So why not get drunk and screw? If you’re up to it.”

  He laughed and then took the bottle back. “I’ve been told I’m not half bad.”

  They went into the bedroom, where she took off all her clothes first and then turned the covers down on the small double as he pulled off his.

  “You like it a little rough?” she asked, facing him.

  “I don’t know.”

  She shoved him down on the bed and straddled him. “I’ll show you how we did it in Vegas.”

  She bent down and kissed him at the same time she caressed both sides of his neck with her long delicate fingers. He slipped inside her, and after that it was easy.

  Lightly at first, as she was fucking him, she applied pressure to his carotid arteries, and within ninety seconds he was passing in and out of consciousness, until he stopped breathing.

  She held on for another three minutes, then reached down and felt for a pulse. But his heart had stopped. He was dead.

  In the shower she vigorously washed her body, and after she had dried off, she rolled Jeff’s body onto the floor, then lay down on the bed and pulled the covers up. She was bone-tired. It had been a long, trying day for her. And the next few could very well be worse.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Schermerhorn stood at one of the bedroom windows on the second floor of the Renckes’ safe house, staring down at the quiet residential street. It was something he’d done a lot of since they’d picked him up. It was midnight, and nothing moved.

  Otto was down the hall at his computer, trying to get some background on Dorothy Givens’s friend at the Chevy Chase apartment and trying without any luck to find the George needle in the Georgetown haystack.

  Dotty or Alex—whoever the hell she was—had been lying, of course.

  “The woman has a sense of humor,” Louise said.

  “And she thinks we’re on to her,” Otto said. “The point is, will she show up at the office in the morning?”

  “Absolutely,” Schermerhorn had said with conviction. “She wants to know who’s coming after her.”

  “If she knows we’re breathing down her back, she’d be a fool not to run,” Louise said.

  “Not Alex. Never been her style. She figures she can win with whatever hand she’s dealt.”

  “Beer?” McGarvey asked.

  Startled, Schermerhorn turned from the window. “Why not?”

  McGarvey had brought up two bottles of Heineken. He gave one to Schermerhorn. “Why do you suppose she let us know it was her, with the George joke?”

  “It’s always been her way. Whenever she walks into a room, she thinks she’s the smartest person there, and she needs to prove it.”

  “Louise thinks we should just arrest her at the gate if she shows up in the morning.”

  “On what charge? Thumbing her nose at us?”

  “Suspicion of murder.”

  “Look, McGarvey, there’s something you guys don’t understand. Even if Dorothy Givens is really Alex Unroth—and I couldn’t even tell you if that’s her real name—you have no proof she murdered Walt or the others.”

  “She was gone from the office on the same weekend Joe Carnes was murdered in Athens last year, and again when Coffin was hit.”

  “Check all the records, and I have a hunch you’ll find she was gone other times. Whenever the DCI was out of town and she had no work on her desk, she was free to go. Wasn’t it the same for your secretary when you were DCI?”

  “Yes.”

  “So that part is coincidental.”

  “What about the killing of her stepfather? You said she admitted to doing it, and that she was perfectly capable of doing the same thing to Walt and the others. She and George did the same thing in Iraq.”

  “Just because she was capable, doesn’t mean she killed our guys.”

  “Why the sudden change of heart?” McGarvey asked. “This morning you were convinced she was the killer, but now you’re not so sure.”

  “I’ve had time to think about it,” Schermerhorn said. He looked out the window again, half expecting to see her walking by or sitting in a car across the street. She was privy to everything the DCI knew, and probably a lot more than that. She would have made friends all over the place. The kind of people who fill in the blanks, the guys who tend to the details—the bits and pieces the bosses never have to deal with.

  “You were in love with her.”

  “We all were.”

  “Still are.”

  Schermerhorn focused on his reflection in the window glass, and he shrugged. “Yes. No. Hell, I don’t know.” He turned back. “But I can tell you I admire her, even if it turns out she did kill those guys.”

  “Christ,” McGarvey said.

  “You were out in the field. You know how it was.”

  “Never as an NOC. I wasn’t that good of a liar.”

  “Maybe not, but you were a damned good assassin.”

  “Point?”

  “The point is, if Dorothy Givens is Alex and we can prove she killed our guys, she won’t allow herself to be taken in. Could be you who’d have to track her down and kill her.”

  “If need be.”

  “But you’d need the proof first.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hold her down long enough to maybe take a cheek swab or maybe grab a glass or a cup she drank out of. Toss her apartment—toothbrushes, hairbrushes, lipstick, makeup. Lots of places to come up with a sample of her DNA, because I can guarantee the one that’s in her Company file won’t be the real one.”

  “Again, what’s your point?”

  “Have you seen the autopsy reports on Walt and Isty?”

  “No.”

  “But you know how they were killed. Their throats were sliced, their faces removed.”

  “There were human teeth marks. The killer chewed open the arteries and then bit off their lips and nose and eyebrows,” McGarvey said.

  “Right. But did you check the autopsies for DNA?”

  “There was none. Apparently scrubbed away with alcohol.”

  Schermerhorn nodded. “And it’s driving your forensics people nuts. You have a psycho killer running around loose inside the campus. But they’re smart enough to leave absolutely no physical evidence tying them to the crimes. So prove it’s Alex.”

  “First we have to find her.”

  “That’ll be the re
latively easy part. If it is she who is doing the killing, then I’m next. She’ll come to me. But unless you catch her in the act, how will you prove it’s her?”

  “I’ll ask her,” McGarvey said.

  Schermerhorn was at a loss for words. Looking at McGarvey, he suddenly had a very clear understanding that everything ever said of the former DCI and more was true. And for a moment he was just as frightened for Alex that she was the killer after all, as he was frightened she wasn’t—and that the killer was George and they were all playing with fire.

  Just the message he’d carved into the fourth Kryptos panel, and now he didn’t know why he had done it. What was the point? He had the urge to tell McGarvey what he had written, but it wouldn’t make any difference. Alex was front and center for now.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Alex walked back down to M Street before six in the morning, where she got a cab over to Reagan National. She rented a Chevy Impala from Hertz, using the work name documents for Alice Walker and paying for the car with a clean Capital One Platinum credit card.

  Traffic was beginning to pick up, and she was careful with her tradecraft to make sure she wasn’t being followed. She took I-395 up past the Pentagon—where she’d thought George had been some sort of a liaison officer, but she had never been able to prove it—and then past Arlington National Cemetery and finally I-66.

  Her primary instinct was to run, go deep, because there was no way in hell she was going to spend the remainder of her life in some jail cell. At the very least, sooner or later Jeff’s body would be found in his love nest, and someone at Clyde’s would remember her leaving with him.

  It’d all be circumstantial, of course—she’d always made sure that any evidence tying her to any crime was weak. But if the Company’s investigators caught a break or two, there’d be enough to convict her.

  And the thing of it was that she didn’t know why she had killed the poor bastard who’d just wanted a one-night stand while his wife was probably fucking her senator. Ever since she was a child, before she murdered her stepfather, she would blank out from time to time; she’d do things that later she couldn’t understand.

  None of this was in any of her Company profiles, of course. She instinctively knew how to lie to shrinks, even good ones, and she never failed a question on a polygraph test, unless it was a lie she wanted to be caught at in order to prove she was human after all.

  She checked her rearview mirrors at intervals, but nothing other than the Harley that had been on her tail for a mile before it passed her and sped off, and the old Lexus that had followed her all the way to where she’d turned north but had continued on I-66, no one else had been of any interest.

  Driving past her apartment in Tysons Corner, she watched for signs that anyone had shown up or that a drone was circling overhead before she parked the Chevy around the corner at another apartment building a block away and went back on foot.

  The car would be noticed sometime today, or perhaps tonight, but by then she figured her situation would be resolved one way or another. In any event, it would never be traced back to her real identity.

  No one had tampered with the fail-safes on her front door, nor had the security panel just inside been touched. Had someone been here, the panel would have sounded a silent alarm and then gone into a default mode that was impossible to reverse.

  She changed into a khaki pants suit, white cotton blouse, and sneakers. She kept a decent pair of black pumps in a desk drawer at work, which she changed into for important meetings, but like just about every other woman on campus, she preferred to be comfortable whenever possible.

  Her real go-to-hell escape kit of several passports and other forms of identification, plus several credit cards and five thousand in cash—mostly U.S. and Canadian dollars, but a few hundred in euros and an equal amount in pesos—she kept in a storage unit nearby, filled mostly with boxes of old clothes she had bought at Goodwill and other thrift stores in the area. If the place were searched, half the boxes would have to be pulled out and emptied before her kit would be found.

  As she stood at the door, she looked at the apartment that had been her secret home for the better part of four years. It was small, only one bedroom, and very neat and modern, with good furniture, top-shelf appliances, a big flat-screen TV and sound system, and some nicely framed art reproductions on the walls. But it meant nothing to her. In her entire life she’d never had a home that meant anything.

  She tossed her big leather purse onto the passenger seat of her deep-green BMW 330ci convertible and headed to work as normal, expecting she would get a few answers she needed, but that she would be on the run again by noon.

  * * *

  The line of cars at the main gate was shorter than it had been for the past several days. When it was Alex’s turn, she handed the officer her ID and gave him a smile.

  “Good morning, Don. Looks like you guys have got this down pat,” she said.

  “Everybody’s finally cooperating,” he said, handing her ID back. “Have a good day, now.”

  “You too.”

  Driving up through the woods to the OHB, she decided today was routine unless the security officer was a damned good actor. Which she didn’t think he was. Evidently, no one had been put on alert about her.

  She parked in the basement lot, the only secretary on campus who was assigned a space inside. As she swiped her card through the reader at the elevator door, a security officer’s image came up on the screen.

  “Good morning, Ms. Givens,” he said, and the elevator door opened.

  She smiled. Everything to this point seemed normal, but her instincts were starting to ramp up. Their instructors at the Farm loved to quote the Navy SEAL litany of Murphy’s laws. Number one was: If everything is going good, you’re probably running into a trap.

  The seventh-floor corridor was empty this morning, but she was early; it would be another twenty minutes before most of the VIPs and their assistants and secretaries started arriving. Except for the five people in the Watch down the hall from the DCI’s suite, most of the offices were still empty.

  The door to Page’s inner office was open when she walked in and set her bag behind her desk then looked in. Page was already there. He seemed to be in good spirits.

  “Good morning, sir. You’re early,” she said.

  “I think we’re going to hit pay dirt this morning. I don’t have to be at the White House until two, so maybe I’ll have some good news for the president by then.”

  “Sir?”

  “We think we have our killer narrowed down to thirty-six people. McGarvey is bringing someone in who might recognize them.”

  “That’s wonderful news. But I thought your White House meeting was at nine.”

  “It’s been moved. Sprague came on board when I explained what was going on.”

  Peter Sprague was the president’s new chief of staff. He ran the White House with an iron fist. So far the media hadn’t caught on to the killings on campus, and the president had made certain there would be no leaks from anyone on his staff. Sprague made sure of it; just as the security team on campus made sure there were none from here.

  “That’s good news,” Alex said. “I’ll update your agenda. I’m sure there’ll be a few additions.”

  “Check with Ken, see if he has anything from the overnights I need to know about.”

  Kenneth Whiteside was the midnight-to-noon chief of the Watch this morning.

  “I’ll do that first,” Alex said.

  She powered up her computer and, while it was booting, walked down the hall to the Watch and entered the director’s code on the keypad. Since the campus had been locked down after the first murder, the door did not automatically open. Whiteside had to make a personal identification of whoever wanted in.

  When he saw it was her, he buzzed open the door.

  “I’ll be glad when we can get back to normal,” he said. He was a short, slightly built man with sandy hair, already turning gray at the sides
even though he was only in his late thirties.

  Five days of twelve-hour shifts, with only the next four off, had taken its toll on him, as it had on the other four analysts in the long narrow room. They had the pallor of people who worked under fluorescent lighting and never got out in the sun much. They either worked here or they were at home, catching up on their sleep.

  “You and me both,” Alex said. “The boss’s White House briefing has been pushed back to two, but he’d like to know if anything interesting showed up in the overnights.”

  “I expected he would,” Whiteside said. He handed Alex a gray folder marked TOP SECRET. “The Pakis walked out on their talks in New Delhi six hours ago.”

  A delegation from Pakistan had been in New Delhi for the past four days, trying to hammer out a nuclear disarmament treaty with their Indian counterparts. It was something President Langdon wanted very badly. He had been working with both governments for the past nine months to bring it about.

  “They’ve run back to their embassy before.”

  “They should be landing in Rawalpindi anytime now.”

  “It’s serious, then.”

  “The White House won’t be happy.”

  Alex patted him on the arm. “They don’t shoot the messenger any longer.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  Whiteside was one of the people on campus who Alex liked. He was a dedicated man who was happy with what he did because he loved his country. He was anything but cynical.

  “I’ll let myself out,” she said, and opened the door in time to see McGarvey and a woman get out of the elevator with a man she would have recognized from across a football field.

  She closed the door.

  Whiteside had gone back to his desk. He looked up. “Forget something?”

  “If we get anything new from our Islamabad and New Delhi stations, Mr. Page will want to know before he goes over to the White House. He’ll be leaving around one thirty, so anything at all until then.”

  “I figured as much. I’ll give O’Connor the heads-up when he comes in.” Dale O’Connor was the incoming shift supervisor.